International Privacy Standard proposed by Google

This seems to me like it will be good for global businesses as a universal standard will allow a more streamlined approach to how to handle individual data.The world's largest Internet search company wants to create new ways to help keep Internet users safe.

Search giant Google Inc. will propose on Friday that governments and technology companies create a transnational privacy policy to address growing concerns over how personal data is handled across the Internet.

Google's global privacy counsel, Peter Fleischer, will make the proposal at a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization meeting in Strasbourg, France, dealing with the intersection of technology with human rights and ethics.

Fleischer's 30-minute presentation will advocate that regulators, international organizations and private companies increase dialog on privacy issues with a goal to create a unified standard.

Google envisions the policy to be a product of self-regulation by companies, improved laws and possible new ones, according to a Google spokesman based in London.

"We don't want to be prescriptive about who does that and what those standards are because it should be a collaborative effort," the spokesman said.

Other organizations have already made progress on privacy standards, he said. For example, Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) created a nine-point Privacy Framework designed to aid countries without existing policies.

Google today proposed that governments and technology companies need to work together to create an international method that details how the personal information of users should be handled on the Internet. Google's Peter Fleischer, chief privacy officer, challenged members of the United Nations to help make sure user privacy remains safe.

"People look to us to show some leadership and be constructive," Fleischer said before speaking before the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization. "By supporting global privacy standards, there will be a debate and part of that debate will be what are motives our."

A large problem is that privacy standards can vary greatly among countries, something that can cause issues for companies that operate in many countries. Along with not having a federal privacy law to protect consumers, laws in the United States often vary state-by-state: another roadblock that will likely need to be fixed.

Another problem facing companies such as Google is that many of the laws are extremely out of date when compared to how the Internet has progressed. An Internet law created by lawmakers just 10 years ago cannot fairly be used today.

"Privacy laws have not kept up with the reality of the internet and technology, where we have vast amounts of information and every time a credit card is used online, the data on it can move across six or seven countries in a matter of minutes," Fleischer said.

Assuming that data is passed through a small handful of information in a short amount of time, companies need to create a safeguard to make sure the data remains safe -- especially since a lot of nations have minimal data protection laws, Fleischer added.

The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) recently created a privacy framework that organizers hope will help nations modify existing laws that deal with user privacy and protection. However, much work must be done due to legal gray areas and loose translation of the privacy framework - for example, general principles are highlighted, but nations are responsible for their own enforcement.

Google already has spoken with Yahoo! and Microsoft over privacy standards, and now plans to speak with regulators from a number of different nations.

At a time when Google is worried about government regulation and laws over privacy, critics of the search engine company claim its recent acquisition of DoubleClick Inc are concerned Google now has the ability to store too much user data. Due to rising pressure from European officials, Google agreed to hold cookies up to two years only - the company originally scheduled cookies to be deleted in 2038.

Some other privacy standard

The P3P standard

The P3P specification has a double nature. On the one hand it is standardizing technical issues to facilitate the exchange of privacy meta information. On the other hand it requires the website to provide certain information necessary to enable the user of do-it-yourself privacy protection (e.g. the entity processing the data, types of collected data, purpose of collection and the type of processing). Requiring this information P3P sets a (minimum) privacy standard.

By offering a P3P policy, websites are giving a binding promise to their users that they will follow the P3P standard as a whole. It is part of the promise to provide the information required by the P3P specification truly and comprehensively. It also includes a careful interpretation according to the P3P specification of what personal identifiable data actually is. All things considered using P3P means agreeing on a legally binding (minimum) privacy standard between the parties.

Legal Privacy Standard

Some countries have their own data protection laws requiring i.e. special user information or allowing data use for special purposes only. These legal privacy standards are especially within European Union member states higher than the P3P specification's requirements (e.g. which information has to be provided in the P3P policy).

The relations between the P3P privacy standard, other legal privacy standards and the parties involved are illustrated in the following chart.

Technorati : International Privacy Standard

(Update) X Prize- $30 Million Prize - google

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Binocular vision gene :Research could lead to treatments for some visual disorders

In work that could lead to new treatments for sensory disorders in which people experience the strange phenomena of seeing better with one eye covered, MIT researchers report that they have identified the gene responsible for binocular vision.

Unlike horses and eagles, whose eyes on the sides of their heads provide two different scenes, humans see a single, in-depth view. Now researchers from the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT have identified the gene responsible for melding images from two eyes into one useful picture in the brain.

The work, which appeared in the Sept. 4 issue of the Public Library of Science (PLoS) Biology and in the journal Cerebral Cortex, shows that a novel gene is necessary for binocular vision.

"There are other instances in the brain where two different inputs have to be properly aligned and matched--such as auditory and visual projections to the midbrain that enable us to orient to sound," said lead author Mriganka Sur, Sherman Fairchild Professor of Neuroscience at the Picower Institute and head of the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. "This is the first study to pinpoint a gene with this kind of job."

Two points of view

Binocular vision allows us to perceive depth and carry out detailed visual processing. The images projected by each eye are aligned and matched up in brain regions called the visual thalamus and cortex.

The MIT researchers discovered that the genes Ten_m3 and Bcl6 have a key role in the early development of brain pathways for vision and touch. Ten_m3 appears to be critical for the brain to make sense of the two disparate images from each eye.

In mice that had the Ten_m3 gene knocked out, projections from their two eyes were mismatched in their brains. Because each eye's projection suppresses the other, the mice were blind, even though their eyes worked normally.

Remarkably, the researchers found that when the output of one eye was blocked at a molecular level, the knockout mice could see again. With one eye's conflicting input shut down, the other eye was able to function, though only with monocular vision.

"This is an amazing instance of 'gain of function' that proves immediately that the gene is directly responsible for creating matched projections from the two eyes," Sur said.

Human disorders in which the Ten_m family of genes is affected are often accompanied by visual deficits. "There are reports of human visual conditions in which simply closing one eye allows a person to see much better," Sur said. "We believe that genes such as Ten_m3 are at the heart of these disorders."

Co-authors include Catherine A. Learney, former MIT postdoctoral associate now at the University of Sydney; Atomu Sawatari, Kelly A. Glendining, Sam Merlin, Paul Lattouf and Natasha Demel of the University of Sydney; MIT affiliates Gabriel Kreiman, Kuan H. Wang and Ning-Dong Kang; Reinhard Fassler and Xiaohong Zhou of the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Germany; and Susumu Tonegawa, Picower Professor of Biology and Neuroscience at MIT.

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Simons Foundation and Australia's National Health and Medical Research Council.

Basic of Binocular vision

Binocular vision is vision in which both eyes are used together. The word binocular comes from two Latin roots, bin for two, and oculus for eye. Having two eyes confers at least four advantages over having one. First, it gives a creature a spare eye in case one is damaged. Second, it gives a wider field of view. For example, a human has a horizontal field of view with one eye of about 150 degrees and with two eyes of about 180 degrees. Third, it gives binocular summation in which the ability to detect faint objects is enhanced. Fourth it can give stereopsis in which parallax provided by the two eyes' different positions on the head give precise depth perception. Such binocular vision is usually accompanied by singleness of vision or binocular fusion, in which a single image is seen despite each eye's having its own image of any object.

Other phenomena of binocular vision include utrocular discrimination, eye dominance, allelotropia, and binocular rivalry.

Technorati : Binocular vision